The Minimum Viable Feature

You’ve been there. A customer asks for a thing they consider to be an easy ask and it’s not in the current product. It might actually be easy or it might be quite hard – you don’t know yet (and you have a sneaking suspicion for one or the other).

You could say “no, not ever”, or “not yet”, or “absolutely – we’ll do it for you” – there are lots of ways to solve the request side of this equation. Those solutions, however, are intimately linked to the way you go about developing your product features.

Committing to building a feature – whether it’s something you intended on building anyway or whether it’s a brand new request that fits into that strategy – requires you to define a Minimum Viable Feature. This description should contain a statement of the problem you’re trying to solve, specifically the Job to Be Done, who the feature serves, and the potential impact created by the feature. Your definition also has to be built in the context of the existing technical capability and business direction of the product.

A Minimum Viable Feature is not just the lowest common denominator of the thing the customer wants you to do and the way you want to do it. It is a carefully considered construction that delivers the job the customer wants to accomplish while laying the groundwork for how similar customers might also want to use that capability in the future. If you put your Future You hat on, you might say that the best feature design helps anticipate and address the future challenges you’ll have while not making people wait until you get there to get 80% of the benefit.

Let’s say you were building an app that let customers tell you about a home improvement problem and you wanted to get as much detail as possible from them so you could accurately estimate the issue. The simplest solution? Ask them to tell you about the scope of the problem, and perhaps take a picture of their leaky sink. The most complicated solution? Take a video of the sink and automatically diagnose the problem. The Minimum Viable Feature version of this might be a highly targeted survey that walks you through the most common problem areas of a specific home improvement area and then instructs you how to take the most helpful video or picture of a specific area to get the maximum input for your effort.

Your version of the Minimum Viable Feature will differ – but the key is to deliver enough functionality and fidelity to the job the customer wants done while building a path to the future of this feature. The more often you do this and the more specific you are about the customer, the benefit, and the way you’ll know if you’ve succeeded or failed, the closer you’ll get to that ideal.